But you are saying that I like the present eligible. That's the trouble. I like him so well I haven't the heart to marry him. When I was twenty I could have loved him devotedly, I believe. Now something seems to be gone, some freshness or fondness. I can still love--I know it only too well night and day--but it must be a different kind of man. He is so very young and reverent and tender, and in a way so unsophisticated. He is so afraid of me, for all his pretence of boldness. Is it because I must be taken by sheer force? I'll not be surprised if it is. Do we not in our secret soul of souls nourish this beatitude: "Blessed is the man who _destroys all barriers"?_ Florence Akemit said as much one day, and Florence, poor soul, knows something of the matter. Do we not sit defiantly behind the barriers, insolently challenging--threatening capital punishment for any assault, relaxing not one severity, yet falling meek and submissive and glad, to the man who brutally and honestly beats them down, and _destroys them utterly?_ So many fail by merely beating them down. Of course if an _untidy litter_ is left we make a row. We reconstruct the barrier and that particular assailant is thenceforth deprived of a combatant's rights. What a dear you are that I can say these things to you! Were girls so frank in your time? Well, my knight of the "golden cross" (_joke; laughter and loud applause, and cries of "Go on!"_) has a little, much indeed, of the impetuous in him, but, alas! not enough. He has a pretty talent for it, but no genius. If I were married to him to-morrow, as surely as I am a woman I should be made to inflict pain upon him the next day, with an insane stress to show him, perhaps, I was not the ideal woman he had thought me--perhaps out of a jealousy of that very ideal I had inspired--rational creatures, aren't we?--beg pardon--not we, then, but I. Now he, being a real likable man of a man, can I do that--for money? Do I want the money _badly enough?_ Would I not even rather be penniless with the man who coerced every great passion and littlest impulse, body and soul--_perhaps with a very hateful insolence of power over me?_ Do you know, I suspect sometimes that I've been trained down too fine, as to my nerves, I mean. I doubt if it's safe to pamper and trim and stimulate and refine a woman in that hothouse atmosphere--at least _if she's a healthy woman_. She's too apt sometime to break her gait, get the bit of tradition between her teeth, and then let her impulses run away with her. Oh, Muetterchen, I am so sick and sore, and yet filled with a strange new zest for this old puzzle of life. Will I ever be the same again? This man is going to ask me to marry him the moment I am ready for him to. Shall I be kind enough to tell him no, or shall I steel myself to go in and hurt him--_make him writhe?_